Articles - Page 3

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/soren-stamer">Sören Stamer</a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/dan-drapeau"> </a>is Co-Founder and CEO of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/coremedia">CoreMedia</a> and a CMS Critic contributor. <hr /> AI now often sits between your brand and your customer, deciding what it tells them about you. The risk that it misrepresents you, or leaves you out of the answer altogether, is real. If a buyer researching their next purchase asks an AI assistant for a shortlist, and the answer attaches a wrong price to your offering, cites an outdated policy, or names a competitor as the better option, the damage is done before you even notice. There is no page to correct and no customer to email, because the person on the other end never visited your site and never will. The only place to influence it is upstream, in the infrastructure your content lives in.<h3 id="the-cms-has-a-new-job:-trust-infrastructure">The CMS has a new job: trust infrastructure</h3>You cannot police what an AI says about your brand at the moment it speaks. But you can shape what it draws on at the root, in the content the model reads before it ever forms an answer. When an AI decides whether to surface your brand, it does not read a web page the way a person does. It looks for signals in your content:<ul><li>Machine-readability: Is the content explicitly modeled?</li><li>Structure: Are the entities, your products, prices, and policies, clearly defined?</li><li>Consistency: Do the claims align across pages, channels, and markets?</li><li>Freshness: Is the content current and up to date?</li><li>Provenance: Is the source authoritative and traceable?</li></ul>How content is structured directly shapes whether an AI can find it, interpret it, and trust it enough to cite you. If your price says one thing on a product page and another in a PDF, an AI cannot tell which is true, so it trusts neither. Meeting these signals in practice means turning marketing prose scattered across sources into defined fields, managed centrally: product attributes, pricing components, and policy blocks an agent can read directly. Get the data right, and it flows straight to brand trust, conversions, and revenue. Get it wrong, and the AI works with whatever it can find and repeats the mess across every answer it gives about you, if it includes you at all. That is why content infrastructure now belongs at the board level, because you want to stay in control of how your brand is represented by AI agents.<h3 id="content-governance-is-mission-critical,-and-ai-makes-it-more-so">Content governance is mission-critical, and AI makes it more so</h3>Governance is the framework that makes sure the right rules are in place and applied: what content can exist, who can change it, how it is structured, and what needs approval before it goes out.It often used to be a checkpoint at the end: route the content through legal, compliance, and marketing, then ship. That worked while people wrote everything, at human speed and human volume. AI changes both: it produces a thousand variants in the time a person reviews one, personalized in real time for every audience and channel, and it does it without judgment. On its own, the model generating that content is context-blind, a confident guesser with no idea what your prices are today or what your brand would never say. At that speed and scale, a person checking each piece after the fact has no chance of keeping up. The rules can no longer live in a review step at the end; they have to be enforced by the system as the content is generated:<ul><li>Brand rules, so it sounds like you, not the internet's average.</li><li>Live proprietary data, so it quotes accurate prices, specs, and policies.</li><li>Compliance boundaries, so it never says what you legally cannot.</li><li>Human handoff, so high-risk content gets a person's sign-off before it ships.</li><li>Ongoing checks, so content that goes stale or off-brand gets caught and corrected.</li></ul>People set those rules at the source, and the platform applies them to everything generated against it, and to everything downstream that draws on it, from LLMs to personalization engines to automated campaigns. Get that source right and the advantage compounds quickly: everything built on top of it stays accurate by default. Teams across the organization, from marketing to sales to support, move faster because they work off one centralized source, delivering a consistent experience that humans and AI alike can trust. The human role shifts from polishing words to steering the system, freeing people for what only they bring to the table: taste, judgment, and accountability. Left to itself, AI is generic; it takes a human touch in the process to make a brand worth choosing.<h3 id="what-enterprises-should-demand-from-an-ai-ready-cms">What enterprises should demand from an AI-ready CMS</h3>Every CMS now claims to be AI-ready. Most mean they have added a few features on top: a copilot in the editor, auto-tagging, and a chat box. Those lift productivity, but that’s no longer the differentiator. The mistake is treating AI as a set of add-ons. It is infrastructure, and it only delivers quality results when it works as a system built on a reliable content foundation:<ul><li>One omnichannel content platform as a source of truth that every channel and agent draws on.</li><li>Content structured for machines, not just for human eyes.</li><li>Governance AI can rely on, enforced as content is generated and optimized.</li><li>Workflows that keep humans in control, at AI-velocity.</li></ul>This is what we built the CoreMedia Experience Platform to be: an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.coremedia.com/content-management-system/ai-powered-cms">AI-first CMS</a>, a centralized content platform for every touchpoint with governance at its core. Make your CMS that trust infrastructure, not just a publishing tool, and that is where you win the customer the AI is choosing for. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3>  <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26"><img style="width:41.96%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/05/cms-connect-logo-26.jpg" /></a><h4 id="cms-connect-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26">CMS Connect 26</a></h4>August 5-6, 2026 – Montreal, CanadaThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Connect brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Montreal, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect26">so book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:35.73%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/05/image-1778200565145.png" /><h4 id="contentstack-contentcon-2026">Contentstack <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/contentcon">ContentCon 2026</a></h4>September 30 - October 1, Amsterdam  /  October 27-28, 2026 – ChicagoContentstack’s annual customer conference is the premier event for executives, marketing leaders, and developers to redefine their digital experience strategy. This is your opportunity to step out of the "status quo" and into "elite" status, learning exactly how the world’s most successful brands are using the technology you already own to do the impossible. Enjoy a full day of interactive workshops, certifications, and inspirational on-stage sessions designed to help you become an expert on cutting-edge digital strategies and how to turn Contentstack's CMS and adaptive personalization tools into your greatest competitive advantage.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> </a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.contentstack.com/contentcon">Book your seats today.</a>

From CMS to AI trust layer: Why content governance is now a board-level priority

soren-stamer

Axe the ‘Coordination Tax’: New data says CX teams are struggling – and AI isn’t helping

matt-garrepy

Forget the SaaS eulogy. Software isn’t dead – but hiding behind it? That's six feet under

Adam Greco’s New Book on Product Evangelism Puts a Spotlight on Humans in an AI World

Matt & Matt, Episode 2: Awards Season, a (Chilled) Canadian Meetup, GEO, ‘Dirty Data,’ and More

cms-critic-staff

Turn every URL into an intelligent agent: Fibr AI’s ‘Agentic Web Experience Platform’ is smart

<hr /> 100 billion. It’s a big number. Hang on. A little context makes it even bigger: It would take a human approximately 9,513 years to count that high. Assuming they could recite one number every 3 seconds, non-stop, 24 hours a day.For <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/products/auxia">Auxia</a> – the customer journey orchestration platform that delivers AI-powered, hyper-personalized customer experiences – that figure is a reality. The company just announced that it has delivered 100 billion cumulative decisions on behalf of its customers. Even more impressive? Auxia’s AI agents now power roughly 400 million autonomous decisions every day, handling tasks like content selection, optimization timing, and determining next-best actions for individual users across channels like web, app, email, and more – all while processing 200 petabytes of first-party data annually.Not bad for a scale-up that’s only been around since 2022. But these numbers are more than just an expression of performance. They’re a clear signal that enterprise marketing teams are successfully breaking through the failures of early Gen AI projects – which have persistently plagued organizations – and deploying stable and scalable agentic systems that deliver revenue.  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:37.86%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/03/image-1773341679320.png" /></figure>Auxia CEO and co-founder Sandeep Menon. Source: LinkedIn When I spoke to Auxia’s CEO and co-founder <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeep-menon-1087901/">Sandeep Menon</a> last October, he was fired up about the opportunity to bridge the gap that marketers have between content and context, and how Auxia enables teams to harness their first-party data and seamlessly orchestrate 1:1, adaptive, hyper-personalized customer journeys. As he framed it, agentic AI was the key to the next wave.“We’re really trying to be an agentic customer journey orchestration platform,” he told me. “We are going from the ‘Old World,’ which is about static, rule-based systems, to one that is much more dynamic.”Auxia has been on a steady tear since 2024, adding several Fortune 1000 clients and delivering stellar results. That led to a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://venturebeat.com/ai/auxia-raises-23-5-million-to-tackle-enterprise-marketings-reacquisition-treadmill">$23.5 million Series A</a> funding round. With cash in hand and an executive heritage from Google and Meta, the company has made significant gains towards its agentic ambitions, where AI is truly impacting outcomes.“We thought, wouldn't it be great if we kind of reimagined how a marketer's workflow should be in the age of AI?” he said previously. “The way it would work, in our perspective, is that you would always have a set of agents working in the background for you and surfacing insights. And then you – as a marketer – can go and look at those insights and then direct other agents to determine what action needs to be taken.”This vision sounds great. But herein lies the challenge: most enterprises are still stuck with legacy marketing stacks that limit their AI agility. There’s fatigue, cognitive overload, and a real hunger for more automation to lighten the load without compromising success. This is where Auxia is providing a pathway to an agent-powered “promised land” with real, quantifiable results. “Enterprise leaders are replacing rigid, rules-based marketing stacks with intelligent agents that optimize customer value in real time,” Sandeep said. “One hundred billion decisions is not just a scale milestone – it is proof that agentic AI delivers measurable top-line impact, not just operational efficiency.”<h3 id="real-impact-and-measurable-business-outcomes">Real impact and measurable business outcomes</h3>Customer journey orchestration (CJO) platforms help businesses to manage, automate, and personalize customer interactions across multiple touchpoints in real-time, using data-driven insights to improve engagement. The tighter integration of communication channels and dynamic personalization can enrich those touchpoints across previously fragmented interactions, so you can proactively guide customers to a conversion from any point in the lifecycle.Like every other segment of software, AI has been changing the game. Auxia’s AI-native solution autonomously determines the best experience for customers by orchestrating cross-channel, real-time journeys across web, app, email, and SMS while optimizing for business goals like activation, retention, cross-sell, and lifetime value. CJO stalwarts like Braze, Insider One, HubSpot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are all moving in the agentic direction, but Auxia is taking a unique approach as a challenger.Even today, only a small number of enterprises have what we could call “sustainable” agentic systems. According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/agentic-panic-new-study-finds-ai-agents-in-production-face-infrastructure-and-reliability-challenges">research by Cleanlab</a>, these systems face significant hurdles, in part because change is fluid. And aside from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro">MCP (Model Context Protocol),</a> large-scale industry standards don’t yet exist.Said another way: We’re still in the early days, and many organizations are still struggling to get their GenAI initiatives to production, let alone their agent ecosystems.But Auxia’s growth might be an indicator that the conditions are changing. As Sandeep told me last year, the company’s focus on delivery has been key to its growth, and is reflected in how they engage with enterprise customers – even from a pricing perspective.“We are very focused on outcomes,” he said. “So a typical engagement would involve going deep into one specific marketing journey or use case that the enterprise wants to transform. Once we identify the use case, then we deploy our system, and the pricing is based on the volume of decisions they take and the usage there.”There were certainly some notable use cases of Auxia’s success in 2025. In one example, a single enterprise deployment generated $12 million in incremental revenue impact within its first year on the platform. Customers also saw CTRs increase by 5x and cross-sell lifetime value rise 84% compared to prior rules-based systems – with implementations completed in weeks, not months.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.auxia.io/blog/100-billion-decisions-and-counting">According to Auxia,</a> one customer even achieved a stunning 50x increase in new sign-ups after replacing a rules-based personalization stack with Auxia’s agent-driven approach. Impressive.Auxia is now powering solutions across the Fortune 500, Global 2000, and industry leaders in media, SaaS, insurance, mobile, and entertainment. In terms of brands, the company has added visible industry leaders like Atlassian, Assurant, The Guardian, Comcast, Mercari, and more to its roster. <h3 id="continued-product-innovation,-scale,-and-growth">Continued product innovation, scale, and growth</h3>Auxia has been steadily advancing its global ambitions. To meet the shifting policy and regulatory landscape, the platform has been built with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and reliability at a core level. This includes SOC 2 Type II certification, GDPR compliance, and more. While its agentic roadmap has also been rapidly evolving, Auxia has been innovating for quite some time. Last July, it released an enhanced version of its AI <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250709871181/en/Auxia-Announces-New-AI-Analyst-Agent-to-Help-Marketing-Teams-Convert-Campaign-Data-Into-Revenue-Insights">Analyst agent,</a> which uses a natural language interface to provide marketing teams with high-speed insights into campaign performance. Before, it was hard to know why AI-powered campaigns were succeeding or failing without complex data analysis. Now, marketers can just ask Auxia’s agent for the answers, effectively giving them a dedicated data scientist. <img style="width:84.68%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/10/auxia-featured-2.jpg" alt="Auxia screenshot" />Auxia UX. Source: Auxia Towards the end of last year, they also introduced <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cts.businesswire.com/ct/CT?id=smartlink&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fcmscritic.com%2Fone-ux-to-rule-them-all-auxia-powers-customer-journeys-with-ai-agents-in-new-unified-experience&amp;esheet=54444340&amp;newsitemid=20260311815297&amp;lan=en-US&amp;anchor=a+unified+interface&amp;index=3&amp;md5=c116cb4cb0570b1e9841ffecf1c444ca">a new unified interface</a> that brings decisioning, content generation, and insights into a single view, enabling marketing teams to manage AI-driven campaigns without technical resources.As Sandeep explained to me during the launch, the new UX also introduced the concept of a “Spark” – a moment of insight that agents uncover and proactively surface for marketers inside a unified dashboard, where it is ranked based on overall confidence. Campaigns are also organized into core marketing workflows called Journeys that align with customer needs. Under it all, Auxia has also expanded its infrastructure capabilities, scaling the platform to handle over 10 billion events per day, with peak loads of 15,000 queries per second. That reflects a 3x increase in capacity since early 2025.According to Auxia’s press release, there’s been rapid customer adoption and expansion. The product has been deployed across more teams, channels, and use cases, growing monthly decisions per customer to 6x year-over-year, and generating a heathy 176% net dollar retention (NDR) rate.Along with expanding its global footprint to include offices in Palo Alto, Tokyo, and Bangalore, Auxia has also quadrupled its headcount with several key hires. Clearly a sign that it’s bullish about the opportunities ahead.<h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>As I noted last year, AI-powered customer journey orchestration is unlocking key benefits for marketers as they look to scale hyper-personalization. Auxia’s vision has drawn real interest and vigor, and they’ve secured the funding to drive the company’s roadmap towards its agentic ambitions.We’re seeing the fruits of those labors – and not just in Auxia’s net gains. The platform’s surpassing of 100 billion autonomous decisions is a clear signal that AI agents are performing with real outcomes.As I said previously, I like the composable, agnostic nature of the product. As Sandeep explained in our last conversation, they work natively at the cloud layer, and they’re able to play with CMS and enhance 1:1 personalization with content decisioning via their agents.“We connect to content management systems, where you can use our agents to determine what is the right content to showcase to somebody at a point in time in their journey to get them to the objective,” he said. My recommendation: Auxia offers a great market alternative with a clear AI-forward motion towards an agentic marketing platform. Like all CJO products, you’ll want to request a demo and play close attention to how data sources are handled, the usability of workflows, and what native channels you’ll want to use now – and in the future. Customer journey tools are all about experimentation, so you’ll need real-world stakes to fully test and optimize, but you can get a sense in a demo of how granular the personalization is and how you can tailor it. Definitely worth a closer look as you explore options.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.auxia.io/demo">You can request a demo here.</a> <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.06%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/cms-summit-26-logo.jpg" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-summit-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26">CMS Summit 26</a></h4>May 12-13, 2026 – Frankfurt, GermanyThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Summit brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Frankfurt, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26/tickets">so book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a>

100 Billion Autonomous Decisions? Auxia’s AI Agents Signal a Big Shift for Enterprise Marketing

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

#ffffff

11,000 Days and Counting: CoreMedia’s Sören Stamer on AI, Digital Sovereignty, and Seizing Opportunity 

The AI Sweet Spot: Debbie Tucek on Kentico’s Agentic Marketing Suite and Finding Value Beyond Hype

AI’s dirty little secret? Dirty data. Here’s how the Clean Data Alliance plans to fix it

<hr /> Talk about voting your hearts out!!!We had an unbelievable turnout for our <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/vote-your-heart-out-here-are-the-finalists-for-the-14th-annual-cms-critic-awards">14th Annual CMS Critic Awards!</a> We owe a huge thanks to YOU and the thousands of other fans who nominated and voted over the last two months.Once again, you showed us how much you love the products you rely on across every category. You rallied your communities and spread the word, and it was seriously fun to watch.Sure, our little awards program has a streak of competitiveness. But it's really about celebrating our industry and the continued innovation we see from all corners. It's also an opportunity to highlight the power of your users – from marketers to developers – and let their voices sing. Most of all, the CMS Critic Awards is a chance to have some fun in our fast-paced, nose-to-the-grindstone, AI-driven world. It reminds us that people, not platforms, are at the center of everything.This year, one vendor really stole the spotlight across multiple categories, and it was a blast seeing how people were activated to participate across social media. Seeing that passion and enthusiasm is what it's all about. From all of us at CMS Critic, thank you again for being part of this year's program. It was your voice, and your choice!So without further ado…<h3 id="the-winners-of-the-14th-annual-cms-critic-awards">The Winners of the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards</h3> - Best Free CMS: Joomla- Best Enterprise CMS: Sitecore- Best Headless CMS: Sitecore- Best Open Source CMS: Joomla- Best Flat File CMS: Statamic- Best ECM (Enterprise Content Management): Microsoft SharePoint- Best DXP: Sitecore- Best Website Builder: Webflow- Best Content Marketing Platform (CMP): Sitecore- Best Digital Asset Management (DAM) System: Sitecore- Best Product Information Management (PIM) System: Optimizely - Best Customer Data Platform (CDP): Sitecore- Best e-Commerce Solution: Sitecore- Best Development/Hosting Platform: Azure- Best AI Solution: Sitecore<h3 id="congratulations-to-this-year's-winners!">Congratulations to this year's winners!</h3>What can we say? We’re thrilled to have an incredible community of readers, and we’re already looking forward to next year’s Awards. Remember to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/signup">sign up for alerts</a> about additional events this year, and check below for some upcoming conferences that we'll be attending and speaking at.       Vendor Marketing Departments: Looking to promote your win? Email us at <a href="mailto:info@cmscritic.com">info@cmscritic.com</a> to request your exclusive badges and claim your 30-day Product Directory upgrade.  <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.06%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/cms-summit-26-logo.jpg" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-summit-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26">CMS Summit 26</a></h4>May 12-13, 2026 – Frankfurt, GermanyThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Summit brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Frankfurt, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26/tickets">so book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a>

Lights, Camera, Community Action! Here are the Winners of the 14th Annual CMS Critic Awards

Agency of Change: RDA’s ‘World-Class’ NPS Reflects a Deep Focus on Digital and AI Transformation

Sanity’s AI Content Operating System Powers Intelligence with Structure and Agents with Context

Best Video Experience

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<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/justincook">Justin Cook</a><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/dan-drapeau"> </a>is President of Internet Marketing &amp; Development at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.9thco.com/">9thCO</a> and a CMS Critic contributor. <hr /> Since the rise in popularity of ChatGPT and other AI search tools, marketers have watched in horror as KPIs drown in red. Organic traffic continues to decline as users begin to “trust” AI search, oftentimes not even leaving the chat experience to explore a cited brand’s website. This behavior is likely to compound as people increasingly offload tedious research, and therefore marketing teams need to adapt and understand what’s needed in order to “show up” in chat, establishing visibility (a.k.a. “share of voice”). This goes far beyond keyword research and throwing schema markup on your site.A critical piece of understanding is the underlying mental model. When using AI chat to ask questions, if the LLM (predominantly static) doesn’t have the data, then a retrieval layer brings in fresher data via relevant “chunked” search queries in order to synthesize an accurate response. Therefore, the goal is not to “optimize for LLMs,” but rather to understand the mechanics of how LLMs leverage retrieval mechanisms and provide the optimal website markup, performance, accessibility, and data structures to qualify for retrieval. And like it or not, the CMS that powers your website behind the scenes can have a direct impact, depending on rendering, markup, and technical SEO capabilities.<h3 id="a-proposed-paradigm-of-retrievability:-eaca">A Proposed Paradigm of Retrievability: EACA</h3>EACA stands for Eligibility, Authority, Compressibility, and Association. These four areas generally encompass factors that influence discoverability. We won’t touch on Authority in this article, as that’s less about technical infrastructure and more about how you're building your brand.  <h4 id="1.-eligibility">1. Eligibility</h4>When you are engaged in a chat experience, some of the perceived “magic” is that you’re in a natural flow of conversation. Therefore, responses are critically time-bound. If you ask a question and have to wait 15 seconds for the response, you would not continue the conversation. So essentially, Eligibility is the determination of whether a page can be crawled, rendered, and indexed. There are standard CMS considerations such as robots.txt configuration, server-side generation/rendering, caching, and revalidation. What this means practically is that you could be ranking #1 in SERPs for many keywords, yet less likely to be indexed, retrieved, or cited by retrieval mechanisms if your CMS employs lazy-loading, infinite scrolling, JavaScript-based rendering, or weak template-to-content ratios.Properly implemented headless CMS solutions can improve Eligibility by decoupling the frontend, where it is stored statically and served from a global edge network. <h4 id="2.-compressibility">2. Compressibility</h4>Compressibility is about assessing the smallest unit of data and content that something can be reduced to while still remaining accurate. This ensures that content is easy to summarize and embed, without losing precision.Interestingly, one of the most straightforward means to ensure Compressibility is to ensure the highest possible standard of web accessibility on your site. How so? Accessible semantic markup creates a clear content hierarchy for AI retrieval mechanisms, making content easier to chunk and summarize and thereby less ambiguous during compression.Again, your choice of CMS has a material impact on your ability to achieve full web accessibility. The following are common limitations:<ul><li>Theming “engine” architecture</li><li>CMS-specific markup</li><li>Editor tooling constraints</li><li>Plugin ecosystem and rendering methodologies </li><li>Page builder behaviors and data models (or lack thereof)</li></ul>Another major factor for Compressibility (particularly for retailers) is surfacing data points as high-signal, atomic facts. So auditing your data governance from the source to how it’s published through your CMS and marked up on the frontend can have a major impact.Ideally, any selected CMS should provide complete control over the front-end implementation and remove any possible theming constraints. <h4 id="3.-association">3. Association</h4>It’s important that an LLM can properly interpret the appropriate conversations within which your brand and content are relevant. The notion of Association means clearly establishing the concepts, entities, and problems your brand/page/content belongs “with.” Association is established via entity co-occurrence, explicit language, and tight topical clusters, which are not CMS-dependent. However, something that helps further by reducing ambiguity and introducing machine-readable relationships is schema markup. Ensure that your CMS allows you to maximize the use of appropriate schema markup in articles, case studies, etc. But it’s also critical to ensure that the schema markup that is surfaced on the frontend is valid. <h3 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h3>AI search-referred users can be highly qualified and engaged, and more likely to convert. It’s true that digital transformation projects are serious undertakings, but it’s worth the effort to ensure that your CMS can support the technical fundamentals and data structures that feed retrieval mechanisms – and surface your content! <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:34.15%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/logo_jday_hor.png" /><h4 id="joomladay-usa-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/">JoomlaDay USA 2026</a></h4>April 29 - May 2, 2026 – Delray Beach, FloridaBe part of the Joomla community in one of the most iconic cities in the world! JoomlaDay USA 2026 is coming to Delray Beach, and you can join us for a dynamic event packed with insights, workshops, and networking opportunities. Learn from top Joomla experts and developers offering valuable insights and real-world solutions. Participate in interactive workshops and sessions and enhance your skills in Joomla management, development, design, and more. And connect with fellow Joomla enthusiasts, developers, and professionals from across the world.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.jdayusa.com/"> Book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.06%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/cms-summit-26-logo.jpg" alt="" /><h4 id="cms-summit-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26">CMS Summit 26</a></h4>May 12-13, 2026 – Frankfurt, GermanyThe best conferences create space for honest, experience-based conversations. Not sales pitches. Not hype. Just thoughtful exchanges between people who spend their days designing, building, running, and evolving digital experiences. CMS Summit brings together people who share real stories from their work and platforms and who are interested in learning from each other on how to make things better. Over two days in Frankfurt, you can expect practitioner-led talks grounded in experience, conversations about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions, and time to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges. Space is limited for this exclusive event, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmssummit26/tickets">so book your seats today.</a> <img style="width:30.13%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1765546475634.png" /><h4 id="umbraco-codegarden-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Umbraco Codegarden 2026</a></h4>June 10–11, 2026 – Copenhagen, DKJoin us in Copenhagen (or online) for the biggest Umbraco conference in the world – two full days of learning, genuine conversations, and the kind of inspiration that brings business leaders, developers, and digital creators together. Codegarden 2026 is packed with both business and tech content, from deep-dive workshops and advanced sessions to real-world case studies and strategy talks. You’ll leave with ideas, strategies, and knowledge you can put into practice immediately. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://codegarden.umbraco.com/">Book your tickets today.</a> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a>

Does your CMS Impact Your Brand’s Visibility in AI Search?

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